Dear Colleagues, 

The composition of the microbiota, the dynamics of its modification, and interactions between microorganisms are fundamental for defining the safety and the quality of food products. Biomolecular techniques drastically increased in the last decades and improved in terms of efficiency, processivity, and applicability. The development and improvement of next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and their application to food microbiology allows deep microbial community definition directly on food samples, avoiding the culture methods and making it possible to identify unculturable microorganisms. Great efforts have been devoted to improving the microbiota definition; however, much remains to be done in terms of creating and improving bioinformatic tools able to manage huge amounts of data. The application of the most commonly applied metabarcoding, as well as more innovative metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, providing an exhaustive description of microbial communities and dynamics in food products, represents the main goal for the future. These will provide insights into the spoilage process, community structure of food products, shelf-life modifications, as well as investigating the effects of food additives in microbial communities of food.

Prof. Dr. Barbara Cardazzo
Dr. Nadia Andrea Andreani
Guest Editors

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• food microbiota
• DNA metabarcoding
• metagenomics
• metatranscriptomics
• bioinformatics